1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an output apparatus configured to output data for printing, a processing apparatus configured to process printing data, and a method therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is known a method for superimposing data on a form having a ruled line at the time of printing to print the resulting superimposed data. Further, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 05-150920 discusses a method in which a format of a form and data are merged on a computer to generate form printing data and the generated form print data is printed, instead of superimposing data on a form having a ruled line at the time of printing.
In the above-described methods, data is superimposed on a form format, or data and a form format are mutually merged. Meanwhile, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open NO. 05-108636 discusses a method for automatically acquiring data to be merged with a form in order to automatically create a repetitive document. In the method discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 05-108636, a pointer indicating information describing a method for acquiring data is embedded in a form format. Furthermore, the data is acquired according to the method for acquiring data indicated by the pointer and the acquired data is merged with the form format.
Further, in a conventional method, a form template is divided for each print setting to be applied to separately and individually print the divided form templates, so as to allow a user to handle the printed form templates as one form for user convenience. However, even if data which is common among the divided form templates is acquired and merged, the form templates are printed as different forms. Accordingly, in this case, it is necessary to acquire data for each individual form template.
Accordingly, if a database has been changed during generation of an individual form, a user may output an individual form as one integrated form. In this case, values included in the data may differ among the forms when the same values should be included in the data.